He’d ruined it. She saw that right away. Another beautiful Southern home ravished by a foreign marauder.
The rounded shape of the entrance hall and its sweeping curl of staircase remained the same, but he’d destroyed Diddie’s romantic pastels by painting the curved walls a dark espresso brown and the old oak moldings chalk white. A jarring abstract hung in place of the painting that had once dominated the space, which had been a life-size portrait of herself at age five, exquisitely dressed in white lace and pink ribbons as she curled at her beautiful mother’s fashionably shod feet. Diddie had insisted the artist add a white toy poodle to the painting, even though they didn’t have a poodle, or any dog, despite Sugar Beth’s pleas. But her mother said she wouldn’t have anything in the house that licked its private parts, or licked anybody else’s for that matter.
White marble inset with bands of taupe had replaced the worn hardwood floors. The antique chests were gone, along with a gilded Marie Antoinette mirror and a pair of gold brocade chairs. Now, a gleaming black baby grand piano dominated the space. A baby grand in the entrance hall of Frenchman’s Bride… Sugar Beth’s grandmother with her avant-garde tastes might have enjoyed the oddity, but Diddie was surely doing belly flips in her grave.
“My, my…” Sugar Beth’s accent headed deeper south, the way it did when she’d been put at a disadvantage. “And haven’t you just put your own stamp on things?”
“I do what amuses me.” He regarded her with the arrogance of a nobleman forced to speak to the scullery maid, but she deserved his hostility, and no matter how much he still raised her hackles, it was time to face the music. Long past time.
“I wrote you a letter of apology,” she said.
“Did you now?” He couldn’t have looked more disinterested.
“It came back. Return to sender.”
“You don’t say.”
He intended to keep her cooling her heels in the entrance hall. She didn’t deserve any better, but she wouldn’t grovel, so she struck a compromise between what she owed him and what she owed herself. “Too little, too late, I realize that. But what the hell? Repentance is repentance.”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t have much to repent.”
“Then pay attention to one who’s been there and done that. Sometimes, Mr. Byrne, a simple ‘I’m sorry’ is the best a person can do.”
“And sometimes the best isn’t good enough, is it?”
He didn’t intend to offer his forgiveness, no surprise there. At the same time, her apology hadn’t exactly sounded heartfelt, and since he deserved heartfelt, her integrity demanded that she do better. But not here, not standing in the foyer like a servant.
“Would you mind if I look around?” She didn’t wait for permission but swept past him into the living room.
“By all means.” His drawl dripped with sarcasm.
The taupe walls matched the marble inlays in the floor, while the deep-seated leather chairs and streamlined sofa repeated the dark brown of the foyer. A symmetrically arranged group of four sepia photographs of marble busts hung over the fireplace, which wasn’t the fireplace she remembered. The old oak mantel with its assorted scorch marks from the times Diddie had forgotten to open the flue had been replaced by a massive neoclassic mantel with a heavy cornice and carved pediment reminiscent of a Greek temple. In another home, she would have loved the bold juxtaposition of classic and modern, but not at Frenchman’s Bride.
She turned to see him framed in the doorway, his posture reflecting the perfect arrogance of a man accustomed to being in control. He was only four years older than she, which would make him thirty-seven. When he’d been her teacher, those four years had formed an unbridgeable chasm, but now they were nothing. She remembered how romantic the Seawillows used to think he was, but Sugar Beth had refused to have a crush on someone who so stubbornly resisted her flirtatious overtures.
She needed to get to that apology again, and this time she had to do it right, but the derision in his inspection of her, combined with the desecration of her home, got in the way. “Maybe I did you a favor. A teacher’s salary could never have bought all this. Congratulations on your book, by the way.”
“You’ve read Whistle-stop?”
The skeptical arch of that elegant eyebrow got her hackles up. “Gosh, I tried to. But there were all those big words.”
“That’s right. You never liked to tax your brain with anything more challenging than a fashion magazine, did you?”
“Hey, if somebody doesn’t read them, there’ll be a whole shitload of women walking around in plaid polyester, and then think how sorry everybody’ll be.” She widened her eyes. “Oops… Now you’re goin’ to give me a detention for vulgarity.”
Time hadn’t done a thing to improve his sense of humor. “Detentions never worked with you, did they, Sugar Beth? Your mother wouldn’t permit them.”
“Diddie sure did have opinions about what was right and wrong for me.” She tilted her head just enough so her hair fell away from her fake diamond studs. “Did you know she refused to let me compete for Miss Mississippi? She said I was sure to win, and she wouldn’t allow any daughter of hers within spitting distance of that tacky Atlantic City. We had a big fuss about it, but you know how Diddie was, once she made up her mind about something.”
“Oh, yes, I remember.”
Of course he did. Diddie was the one who’d gotten him fired. Which made it time to drop the bull and take another stab at those long overdue amends.
“I am sorry. Really. What I did was inexcusable.” Meeting his eyes was a lot tougher than she wanted it to be, but this time she didn’t falter. “I told her I’d lied, but the damage was done by then, and you’d already left town.”
“Odd. I don’t recall Mummy trying to track me down. It’s strange an intelligent woman never figured out how to ring me up and say that all was forgiven, that I hadn’t-how did she put it that day?-betrayed my position of authority by compromising her innocent daughter’s virtue?”
The way he lingered over those last three words told her he knew exactly what she and Ryan Galantine had been doing in the backseat of her red Camaro. “No, she didn’t. And I didn’t have the guts to tell my father the truth.”
Griffin had found out, though, when he’d dug through her mother’s papers a few months after she died, and discovered the letter of confession Sugar Beth had written. “You’ve got to admit, Daddy did all right by you. He practically took out an ad in the paper telling everybody I lied.”
“Nearly a year had passed by then, hadn’t it? A bit late. I’d already been forced back to England.”
She started to point out that he’d managed to return to the States-his book jacket said he was now an American citizen-but she’d only sound as though she was trying to defend herself. He uncoiled from the doorway and wandered over to a wall unit that held a wet bar. A wet bar in Diddie Carey’s living room…
“Would you like a drink?” It wasn’t the invitation of a good host but the softly spoken gambit in a cat-and-mouse game.
“I don’t drink anymore.”
“Reformed?”
“Hell, no. I just don’t drink.” She was on a roll, peggin’ the old laugh-meter. She was killing herself here.
He poured out a few inches of what looked like a very expensive single malt scotch. She’d forgotten how large his hands were. She used to tell everybody who’d listen that he was the biggest sissy in town, but even then, those meat-hook hands had made her look like a liar. They still didn’t seem to belong to someone who’d recited sonnets from memory and occasionally tied back his hair with a piece of black velvet ribbon.
One night a bunch of them had left school late and spotted him on the intramural field with a soccer ball. Soccer hadn’t caught on in Parrish, and they’d never seen anything like it. He’d bounced the ball from one knee to another, off a calf, a thigh, keeping it in the air until they lost count. Then he’d begun dribbling it down the field, running at full speed, the ball right between his feet. After that, the boys’ opinions of him had changed, and it wasn’t long before they’d invited him to join them at the basketball hoop.